This is a tale about three MPs. One of them, the retired veteran ANC MP, Ben Turok, – now aged 90, former political prisoner and an exile for roughly 25 years – wrote some very wise words in the Dispatch last week in support of the brave ANC MP, Makhosi Khoza (who is not much more than half his age).
He wrote that he found it “baffling” how “little insight normally well-informed people have of the parliamentary process”. Few universities, he went on, teach their students about South Africa’s parliamentary (and thus, also, electoral) process, and as a result – “ignorance of the legislative process is universal”.
This is a terrible indictment of a country that was venerated as a global icon of democratic emancipation when Nelson Mandela became president in 1994, and now a sink of corruption and state capture.
From someone who had a guiding hand in drawing up the Freedom Charter back in the ancient days of 1955, Ben Turok’s words are the best possible, first-hand, informed indicator that something is profoundly wrong in modern, 21st century South Africa. It shoves the question in our face: What is wrong? – And why? And how to fix it?
Ben followed up this thought – that even the universities are deaf, dumb and blind on this key to the workings of the Constitution – with a comment which strikes home still more sharply: that “even the student movement, which has shown such militancy on occasion, seems to have little depth and even less interest in the broader political arena. I am not aware of any expressions of solidarity for Khoza even though they surely agree with her sentiments on Zuma. It seems that the small groups of radical students at universities are more concerned with protecting their turf against those who don’t toe their line than in playing a part in the current political turbulence”.
With that indictment, he provided Dispatch readers also with what for many – including this reader – was the first detailed account of the precise way in which Luthuli House controls and subjugates its tame, appointed MPs, so that they dare not step out of line for fear of losing their job, their pension and their privileges – to hell with the welfare of the people! This was an article to read again and again. This was the system against which Makhosi Khoza showed the spirit of defiance of a vanished age, opposing corruption and injustice on her own, despite threats to her life and the lives of her children.
It is helpful at this point to remember another MP from that vanished age – Helen Suzman (1917-2009), and to compare her position as an MP during the brutal violence of the apartheid era with that of Makhosi Khoza today. The difference is not that Helen Suzman was white in an all-white, minority legislature. The key difference is that she had protection to speak her own mind as an MP, and to act according to her conscience, while Makhosi Khoza has no protection at all. That is the dagger in the heart of South Africa's modern political process – the systemic flaw in the 1993-96 Constitution, which now threatens the country with terrible dangers and endangers the achievements of a century of struggle.
When first elected as an MP in 1953 until her retirement from parliament 36 years later in 1989 – the eve of unbanning of political organisations by the De Klerk government, and the release of Nelson Mandela, whom she had visited in prison – Helen Suzman was protected as an MP: protected by being elected through all those years by voters in a constituency, instead of being appointed by a clique of party bosses. In that single, crucial respect, disregarding its undemocratic essence as the preserve of a racial electoral minority, the apartheid parliament of the whites was more democratic than the present parliament of the entire liberated and enfranchised adult population, above all its previously oppressed black majority.
Under apartheid, all MPs were protected because they were chosen by name as individuals by the voters. The voters knew them and chose them, whether they were good or bad. Provided they were not convicted in a court of law, there was nothing which all the terrorising power of the State President, or the security police, or the big shots of their own party could do to stop them serving their constituents, and acting according to the dictates of their conscience, as Makhosi Khoza is doing now, and as Helen Suzman did.
Once they had the confidence of the voters in their local constituency who elected them, they were untouchable as an MP until the next general election, when the voters were free to choose once again. Instead of being allowed to tick a box only for a political party – such as ANC or DA or EFF – as at present, the white voters in their restricted general elections had the freedom to choose a named and known individual, who had in turn been selected by their own party branch: a power fatally missing from ANC branches today, despite having been normal for the branches of white political parties up until 1994.
In that sense, black voters and black majority party branches still do not have the powers enjoyed by whites up to 1994.
South Africa is not yet a fully democratic country, with representative politicians.
In that sense, ANC MPs are generally just as remote and abstracted from voters today as black people were excluded from any connection with MPs in the apartheid parliament. One top-down power has replaced another top-down power.
Without the power of the people who choose them, MPs today are as powerless as black people under apartheid. It is another apartheid that needs to be overcome, between the people and their MPs.
Here, too, the voters of modern SA need to discover “the power of the powerless”.
This, for me – as someone whose hair was cut by Ben Turok in Pretoria Local Prison when I arrived with my convicted colleagues in April 1965, and where Helen Suzman later visited us to inquire how we were treated – is the answer to the riddle indicated by Ben, when he writes how even militant students today “have little depth and even less interest in the broader political arena”.
As in the days of Steve Biko, we need a new era of “conscientisation”.
Turok’s right about ‘power of the powerless’ in SA today
He wrote that he found it “baffling” how “little insight normally well-informed people have of the parliamentary process”. Few universities, he went on, teach their students about South Africa’s parliamentary (and thus, also, electoral) process, and as a result – “ignorance of the legislative process is universal”.
This is a terrible indictment of a country that was venerated as a global icon of democratic emancipation when Nelson Mandela became president in 1994, and now a sink of corruption and state capture.
From someone who had a guiding hand in drawing up the Freedom Charter back in the ancient days of 1955, Ben Turok’s words are the best possible, first-hand, informed indicator that something is profoundly wrong in modern, 21st century South Africa. It shoves the question in our face: What is wrong? – And why? And how to fix it?
Ben followed up this thought – that even the universities are deaf, dumb and blind on this key to the workings of the Constitution – with a comment which strikes home still more sharply: that “even the student movement, which has shown such militancy on occasion, seems to have little depth and even less interest in the broader political arena. I am not aware of any expressions of solidarity for Khoza even though they surely agree with her sentiments on Zuma. It seems that the small groups of radical students at universities are more concerned with protecting their turf against those who don’t toe their line than in playing a part in the current political turbulence”.
With that indictment, he provided Dispatch readers also with what for many – including this reader – was the first detailed account of the precise way in which Luthuli House controls and subjugates its tame, appointed MPs, so that they dare not step out of line for fear of losing their job, their pension and their privileges – to hell with the welfare of the people! This was an article to read again and again. This was the system against which Makhosi Khoza showed the spirit of defiance of a vanished age, opposing corruption and injustice on her own, despite threats to her life and the lives of her children.
It is helpful at this point to remember another MP from that vanished age – Helen Suzman (1917-2009), and to compare her position as an MP during the brutal violence of the apartheid era with that of Makhosi Khoza today. The difference is not that Helen Suzman was white in an all-white, minority legislature. The key difference is that she had protection to speak her own mind as an MP, and to act according to her conscience, while Makhosi Khoza has no protection at all. That is the dagger in the heart of South Africa's modern political process – the systemic flaw in the 1993-96 Constitution, which now threatens the country with terrible dangers and endangers the achievements of a century of struggle.
When first elected as an MP in 1953 until her retirement from parliament 36 years later in 1989 – the eve of unbanning of political organisations by the De Klerk government, and the release of Nelson Mandela, whom she had visited in prison – Helen Suzman was protected as an MP: protected by being elected through all those years by voters in a constituency, instead of being appointed by a clique of party bosses. In that single, crucial respect, disregarding its undemocratic essence as the preserve of a racial electoral minority, the apartheid parliament of the whites was more democratic than the present parliament of the entire liberated and enfranchised adult population, above all its previously oppressed black majority.
Under apartheid, all MPs were protected because they were chosen by name as individuals by the voters. The voters knew them and chose them, whether they were good or bad. Provided they were not convicted in a court of law, there was nothing which all the terrorising power of the State President, or the security police, or the big shots of their own party could do to stop them serving their constituents, and acting according to the dictates of their conscience, as Makhosi Khoza is doing now, and as Helen Suzman did.
Once they had the confidence of the voters in their local constituency who elected them, they were untouchable as an MP until the next general election, when the voters were free to choose once again. Instead of being allowed to tick a box only for a political party – such as ANC or DA or EFF – as at present, the white voters in their restricted general elections had the freedom to choose a named and known individual, who had in turn been selected by their own party branch: a power fatally missing from ANC branches today, despite having been normal for the branches of white political parties up until 1994.
In that sense, black voters and black majority party branches still do not have the powers enjoyed by whites up to 1994.
South Africa is not yet a fully democratic country, with representative politicians.
In that sense, ANC MPs are generally just as remote and abstracted from voters today as black people were excluded from any connection with MPs in the apartheid parliament. One top-down power has replaced another top-down power.
Without the power of the people who choose them, MPs today are as powerless as black people under apartheid. It is another apartheid that needs to be overcome, between the people and their MPs.
Here, too, the voters of modern SA need to discover “the power of the powerless”.
This, for me – as someone whose hair was cut by Ben Turok in Pretoria Local Prison when I arrived with my convicted colleagues in April 1965, and where Helen Suzman later visited us to inquire how we were treated – is the answer to the riddle indicated by Ben, when he writes how even militant students today “have little depth and even less interest in the broader political arena”.
As in the days of Steve Biko, we need a new era of “conscientisation”.
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